Stacking small sheets of glass, or lites as they are termed within the industry, is presently largely dependent on manual labor and/or antiquated machinery having limited flexibility in the manner in which the lites are handled and stacked. Either method, unfortunately, has a tendency to yield highly inefficient and protracted stacking processes.
Specifically, operators/laborers of glass manufacturing machinery are burdened with having to manually remove individual lites from a feed conveyor, stack each of the lites on transportation racks and thereafter continuously repeat this same step in what essentially amounts to a highly labor-intensive cyclic process. The inherent disadvantage of such a manual process is that cycle times are typically between two to three seconds per cycle, resulting in cycle inefficiencies and thus, high operational costs.
Although attempts at reducing manual stacking of lites have been made via implementation of robotic technology, typical cycle time for such robotic machinery is between eight and ten seconds per cycle, thus resulting in operational inefficiencies and further requiring additional machinery to maintain cycle and stacking demands.
Additionally, machinery specifically designed for glass stacking purposes is disadvantageously limited in the manner in which the lites must be stacked. Specifically, such machinery is usually restricted to picking up glass sheets from the top or bottom of the sheet as the sheets leave the conveyor belt, thus prohibiting the machine from stacking the lites in multiple rows and/or tiers and leading to inherently longer cycle times.
Therefore, it is readily apparent that there is a need for a method and apparatus for stacking small sheets of glass or the like, wherein manual stacking is eliminated and robotic/machine cycle times are significantly reduced, and wherein such an apparatus enables the stacking of small sheets of glass/lites or the like in single and/or multiple rows and/or tiers.